Wuthering Heights, it seems as if Emerald Fennell got inspired by the vertical micro-dramas you see on your Facebook feed: broad, loud, in-your-face performances. Except those vertical shorts are better.

It is unfair to compare Fennell’s movie to Emily Brontë’s novel, as with any film adaptation of a book, since they are two completely different mediums. A filmmaker, as an artist, is not a photocopier.

So Fennell’s neo-Gothic reinterpretation of the Victorian classic novel, packed with anachronistic styling, is melodramatic, garish and spectacularly boring. For two hours and 16 minutes, I sat there wondering if the crowd watching the Anne Curtis and Jericho Rosales love story in the cinema next door were having a better time.

Borrowing Brontë’s romantic tragedy, Wuthering Heights takes us to a Game of Thrones-like place but low-budget and overly stagey. The estate, as we all know, is called Wuthering Heights, a farmhouse-style manor on the Yorkshire moors and the Earnshaw family home.

One day, the father (Martin Clunes), a drunk domestic despot, comes home with a dirty, ragged stray boy (Adolescence’s Owen Cooper) and gives him to his small daughter Cathy (Charlotte Mellington) as a “pet.”

Cathy gives her new pet a name — Heathcliff — and they become close, until these two best buddies on the moors eventually grow up to be Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.

So, Heathcliff and Cathy, as adults, form a trauma bond. She marries into wealth, to a rich, boring dude, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), and moves into his gaudy Thrushcross Grange, where Edgar’s woman-child sister Isabella (Alison Oliver) also lives.

Heathcliff, now rich, eventually becomes Cathy’s side piece, and we are subjected to their dull illicit sexual affair. And you keep wondering: where the hell is Edgar? Is he blind? Is he deaf? That the low-key villain Nelly (Hong Chau) has to spell it out for him?